The Thing That Should Not Be
by Nalanzu
Summary: It's a perfectly normal day by Green Lantern standards. Really.


It was crafty, sneaking around silently and waiting for the most opportune moment to strike. _Well, of course it was crafty,_ Hal Jordan reminded himself. It had Oracle's brain in that green caricature head. He crouched on one side of the asteroid, furiously calculating options. His ring – the source of his power as Green Lantern – would make anything he could think of, but this didn't help when he couldn't see his opponent.

"Hal!" Glowing brightly green, Kyle Rayner hovered above him, relief in every line of his expression.

Heart racing, Hal grabbed Kyle and dragged him unceremoniously into cover. "You know better than to sit there like a target!" he hissed. Kyle shook his hand off, the relief in his face fading.

"Target? It's over, Hal, John's got him and he's dragging him back to Oa. Let's go."

"Sssh!" Hal motioned for Kyle to keep his voice down. "It's still out there." He peered past the lip of the asteroid again, but more floating rocks and dust obscured his vision. A rapidly diminishing speck of green he dismissed as his partner, John Stewart, taking the first perpetrator back to Oa. But the second, the second was still stalking them.

"Uh, Hal?" Kyle shone a constructed flashlight directly in his eyes, and Hal batted it away. "You okay?"

The thing floated past, Oracle's face stretched into a twisted grin. It raised its hands, and they flowed from a replica of Hal's own to a perfect mimic of the second Blue Beetle, complete with flash gun. Hal relaxed minutely, remembering that Ted's weapon was non-lethal, before the thing fired straight at Kyle. Hal shoved him out of the way, the bolt singing the back of his uniform and vaporizing a hole straight through the asteroid. He threw a construct hammer back at it, but the thing was already gone.

"What the hell was that?" Kyle flung a shield over them both, trying to look in every direction.

"I told you it was out there." Hal brushed at the singed spot and then promptly forgot about it. "Lose the shield, or it'll be on top of us before –"

Stone chips flew into the air as the thing rushed them this time, Beetle's hands exchanged for a giant broadsword and the indeterminate spandex outfit morphed into a flowing Asian robe. "You cannot kill a god of death," it sang, voice a disturbing mix of Oracle and Hal himself.

Kyle nearly shrieked an epithet and pulled them both out of the way and across a horribly unprotected open space. "Stay down there," he said, pushing Hal into a crevice. "I'll take care of it."

"Like hell," Hal said, manhandling his way past Kyle. The younger Lantern stumbled and it probably saved his life. The thing had rematerialized with a feminine body – and yet Ted's hands, eerily accurate, were still at the ends of its arms – and a punch hard enough to dent rock.

Kyle's eyes went round. "It's Buffy!" he said, and Hal had no time to dwell on the ramifications of Kyle recognizing a character from bad science fiction television by her torso alone within seconds of nearly being pulverized by it, because it tried to hit him, too. He dodged, just in time, and the thing started singing.

Hal launched himself at it, ignoring the drunkenly warbled lines revolving around mushrooms and time-traveling trains and other random nonsense, but it was as if the thing knew every move he would make before he himself did. He feinted left and it dodged on the right. He sent a construct sailing towards it and it flipped over the top. Kyle, inexplicably, stood there watching, arms crossed and a quizzical expression on his face.

"Run, or it'll get you too!" Hal shouted, knowing that this was how he was going to die.

"Sorry, Hal," Kyle said, and punched him in the face.

Bright lights and a pounding headache greeted Hal when he woke, feeling as if he'd been run over by a Mack truck. No, wait, that hadn't been a Mack truck. It had been Kyle's fist. He sat bolt upright, ready to demand an explanation, but the sudden wave of dizziness pushed him back down.

"Feeling better?" John asked from the door.

"Um." The room was Oan, Hal realized. "Yes."

"We're not sure how he did it, but our alien friend managed to poison you with some sort of hallucinogen," John told him, striding fluidly across the room and sinking gracefully into a chair. "You unconsciously made some sort of bizarre construct and let it chase you around."

A quick glance told Hal that the ring was not, in fact, on his hand. John glanced at the small bedside table. "Give it a couple of days and the toxin should finish working its way out of your system."

"So it wasn't… real?"

"No more than anything else we make," John assured him.

"Ugh." Hal rubbed his eyes. "Remind me to apologize to Kyle."

John's grin was not at all reassuring. "No need for that. He seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny."

"I'm never going to live this down, am I."

The grin, if anything, just got wider.

FINIS


End file.
